Flemish Baroque painting

Flemish Baroque painting was a style of painting in the Southern Netherlands during Spanish control in the 16th and 17th centuries. The period roughly begins when the Dutch Republic was split from the Habsburg Spain regions to the south with the Spanish recapturing of Antwerp in 1585 and goes until about 1700, when Spanish Habsburg authority ended with the death of King Charles II. Antwerp, home to the prominent artists Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, and Jacob Jordaens, was the artistic nexus, while other notable cities include Brussels and Ghent.

Rubens, in particular, had a strong influence on seventeenth-century visual culture. His innovations helped define Antwerp as one of Europe's major artistic cities, especially for Counter-Reformation imagery, and his student Van Dyck was instrumental in establishing new directions in English portraiture. Other developments in Flemish Baroque painting are similar to those found in Dutch Golden Age painting, with artists specializing in such areas as history painting, portraiture, genre painting, landscape painting, and still life.

General characteristics

"Flemish", in the context of this and artistic periods such as the "Flemish Primitives" (in English now Early Netherlandish painting), often includes the regions not associated with modern Flanders, including the Duchy of Brabant and the autonomous Prince-Bishopric of Liège. By the seventeenth century, however, Antwerp was the main city for innovative artistic production, largely due to the presence of Rubens. Brussels was important as the location of the court, attracting David Teniers the Younger later in the century.

Late Mannerism

Although paintings produced at the end of the 16th century belong to general Northern Mannerist and Late Renaissance approaches that were common throughout Europe, artists such as Otto van Veen, Adam van Noort, Marten de Vos, and the Francken family were particularly instrumental in setting the stage for the local Baroque. Between 1585 and the early 17th century they made many new altarpieces to replace those destroyed during the iconoclastic outbreaks of 1566.